What Every Housekeeper Should Know About the Products They're Breathing In Every Day
For most people, cleaning is something they do for an hour or two each week.
For professional housekeepers, it's completely different.
Whether you're cleaning holiday lets during the Cornish summer season, maintaining hotels, servicing guest houses or preparing luxury homes for guests, cleaning isn't an occasional task, it's your working day.
During peak season, many housekeepers spend six, eight or even ten hours a day using cleaning products. They spray bathrooms, wipe kitchens, polish glass, disinfect surfaces and freshen rooms, often moving from one property straight to the next.
When you're exposed to cleaning products all day, every day, it's worth asking a simple question:
What are those products doing to your body over time?
It's a question that changed everything for us, and it's one of the reasons The Cornish Cleaning Company exists today.
The Study That Stopped Us in Our Tracks
A Norwegian study that followed more than 6,000 people over a period of 20 years found something surprising.
Researchers discovered that women who cleaned regularly experienced significantly greater declines in lung function than those who didn't clean as frequently.
Even more striking was the comparison the researchers made.
The decline in lung function observed in regular users of cleaning products was comparable to the lung-function loss associated with smoking up to 20 cigarettes a day over time.
Read that again. Not because cleaning products are the same as cigarettes, but because repeated exposure to cleaning chemicals appeared to have a measurable impact on respiratory health over many years.
For professional cleaners and housekeepers, that's particularly important because their exposure isn't weekly—it's daily.
Why Housekeepers May Be More Exposed Than Anyone Else
Think about a typical summer day for a holiday-let cleaner, bathroom spray, Glass cleaner, Limescale remover, Kitchen degreaser, Furniture polish, Air freshener, Multi-surface spray.
Then repeat that process several times across multiple properties.
Many housekeepers spend years working in enclosed spaces while repeatedly breathing in microscopic airborne particles created by sprays and fragranced cleaning products.
It's not one exposure, it's thousands, day after day, month after month, year after year.
If you're cleaning professionally, your lungs experience far more contact with cleaning products than the average homeowner ever will.
The Problem With Spray Products
Researchers noted that spray cleaning products may be especially significant. When you spray a product, it doesn't simply land on the surface, tiny particles become suspended in the air. Many of those particles are then inhaled. For a homeowner cleaning once a week, that exposure may be relatively limited, but for a professional cleaner completing five or six properties a day, the exposure can be continual.
This is particularly relevant during Cornwall's busy holiday season when housekeepers often work long days preparing accommodation for incoming guests.
What We Started Hearing From Cleaners
For years we listened to professional cleaners talk about the issues they experienced while using conventional cleaning products.
Common complaints included:
- Headaches during long shifts
- Irritated eyes
- Dry skin
- Sore throats
- Persistent coughing
- Feeling "foggy" after a day of cleaning heavily fragranced properties
Not everyone experiences these issues, of course, but we heard the same concerns often enough that we felt they deserved attention. The Norwegian study didn't make us afraid of cleaning, It encouraged us to ask better questions about what professional cleaners are exposed to every single day.
Looking Beyond "Natural" Labels
As we started investigating cleaning products more closely, we discovered something surprising, not everything marketed as natural is as natural as it appears.
Many products promoted as eco-friendly, plant-based or naturally derived still contain:
- Fragrance
- Parfum
- Proprietary scent blends
- Undisclosed fragrance ingredients
That didn't sit comfortably with us, especially when those products are being used repeatedly by professional cleaners who spend entire working days around them.
The Problem With "Fragrance" and "Parfum"
Many people assume that if a product smells natural, the scent must come from essential oils, unfortunately, that's not always the case.
The words "fragrance" and "parfum" can represent mixtures of hundreds of chemical compounds that don't need to be individually disclosed on labels.
That means consumers, and professional cleaners, have no idea exactly what they're breathing in. For people using these products occasionally, that may seem less important, but for someone using them eight hours a day, five or six days a week, transparency matters.
Why We Couldn’t Find What We Wanted
As professional cleaners working throughout Cornwall, we wanted products we felt genuinely comfortable using every day, not just in our own homes, but in our workplaces.
Products that would be used repeatedly by our cleaning teams throughout the year.
We wanted:
- Effective cleaning performance
- Beautiful natural fragrance
- Complete ingredient transparency
- No hidden perfume blends
- No fragrance oils masquerading as natural ingredients
Surprisingly, we struggled to find them, so we decided to create them ourselves.
A Real-World Observation From Our Own Team
The Cornish Cleaning Company products were developed first and foremost for people who clean for a living.
After creating our cleaning solution Olivia, founder of Olivia's Cleaning Department introduced it to her cleaners who used it consistently for a year, and we asked her team for their feedback.
Every cleaner reported that they felt their health and wellbeing had improved since moving away from conventional cleaning products.
This was their personal experience rather than a scientific study, and individual experiences will naturally vary.
However, hearing the same feedback from an entire team of professional cleaners who use cleaning products every day reinforced our belief that what we breathe while cleaning matters.
Why The Cornish Cleaning Company Exists
The Cornish Cleaning Company was created from one simple belief:
Cleaning products should make homes feel wonderful without unnecessarily compromising the air you breathe.
That philosophy shapes every product we make.
Our products are created using:
✔ Plant-derived ingredients
✔ Full ingredient transparency
✔ Pure essential oils for fragrance
✔ No fragrance oils
✔ No parfum
✔ No undisclosed scent blends
Because we believe professional cleaners deserve to know exactly what they're working with every day.
Why We Use Pure Essential Oils
Scent matters.
Guests remember how a holiday home smells when they walk through the door.
Clients remember how a freshly cleaned property feels.
Housekeepers know that cleanliness is about more than appearances, It's about creating an atmosphere.
That's why every fragrance in our products comes solely from carefully selected pure essential oils, No hidden perfumes, No fragrance oils, No mystery ingredients.
Just transparent formulations and ingredients we're proud to put on the label.
Rethinking What "Clean" Means
For decades we've been taught that clean means strong perfume. The stronger the smell, the cleaner the room must be, but it's time to rethink that idea.
After all, the people most exposed to cleaning products are often the people doing the cleaning.
Why We Do Things Differently
At The Cornish Cleaning Company, we believe professional cleaners deserve products that work brilliantly and are transparent about what's inside them.
We believe in beautiful homes, we believe in honest ingredients, we believe in pure essential oils rather than hidden fragrance blends, and we believe that the people who spend their lives cleaning should be able to feel confident about the products they're using.
That's why we created The Cornish Cleaning Company.
And that's why we'll continue to do things differently. 🌿